Hi all
I am a bit confused about which way the market is going at the moment. Google seems to be steadfast in sticking to shorter PPC creatives (25 characters for title, and 70 total for description), but then I notice they have been testing a longer format too.
Then, Y!SM announce (in December) they are moving from their long-standing 40-character title, and 190-character description to a model similar to Google's.

I can understand Y!SM wanting to move more in line with the market leader, but what's the science behind this?

Which style of creative performs best. Does anyone have any stats they will share with the community about campaigns they have run on both engines re. CTR, conversions etc... I would like to think that this shift towards a shorter creative is based on more than a desire to conform!

Years ago, I worked in newspaper classified advertising. Our advice to advertisers was always "the more you tell, the more you sell." This is true for PPC as well. Yahoo's longer ads definitely do a better job of getting targeted clicks. But it's hard to compare apples to apples, because the audiences for the two engines are so different, and the programs keep changing in terms of distribution partners, "quality score," and so on.

Thanks Melissa - it's great to hear your take on these things. I guess this is an assumption we can all make; the more info you put in a listing, the more qualified the user's decision to click is. However, I wonder if anyone has any stats they would be able to share in order to qualify what we believe to be true?